IN ALLE EERLIKHEID...

ANDER KORRESPONDENSIE

Van: dinker@yahoogroups.com [mailto:dinker@yahoogroups.com] Namens Leon Muller van den Berg
Verzonden: woensdag 19 september 2012 8:49
Aan: beeldbou@yahoogroups.com; dinker@yahoogroups.com; fintaal@yahoogroups.com; jyseg; Kreadinamika Afrikaansrenaissance; AfrikaansRenaissance@yahoogroups.com; ons_vans@yahoogroups.com; taalgesprek@yahoogroups.com; taalmanak@yahoogroups.com; talefoon@yahoogroups.com
CC: Leon van den Berg
Onderwerp: [dinker] MOET ONS NIE WEER IN STEEK LAAT!

 

JOERNALISTE EN
WETENSKAPLIKES
- MOET ONS
ASSEBLIEF NOOIT
WEER IN DIE
STEEK LAAT NIE . . !

Wat het ideale joernaliste en ideale wetenskaplikes gemeen?

Minstens skeptisisme oor enige amptelike verklarings van nuwe gebeure deur mense wat bekend is vir vals verklarings - naamlik politici en hul dienaars.

Nuuskierigheid, verkenning van verskeie moontlikhede en avontuurlus motiveer die goeie joernalis én goeie wetenskaplike.

'n Blinde geloof in paranoïese verklarings, wat nie aan al die vereiste maatstawwe voldoen waarmee goeie joernaliste en goeie wetenskaplikes hul werk doen nie, is nie bloot nalatig nie, dis roekeloos en selfs misdadig.

Kennelik moet enige joernalis en/of wetenskaplike wat sy/haar professie werd is, die volgende hebbelikhede van staatslui ernstig, deeglik en in die openbaar betwyfel:

1) Eenmenskommissies - Ná die moord op 6 September 1966 op die SA premier H.F. Verwoerd, byvoorbeeld, is net regter J.T. van Wyk deur die nuwe staatshoof, John Vorster, opdrag gegee om dit te ondersoek.

2) Samesweringsaantygings - oor wat eintlik alternatiewe hipoteses is in reaksie op amptelike verklarings wat nie gestaaf kan word nie.

Die joernalis en/of wetenskaplike moet a) die amptelike verklaring deeglik probeer weerlê, en as hy/sy dit regkry, moet b) soveel joernaliste/wetenskaplikes moontlik met so 'n groot verskeidenheid hipoteses moontlik vorendag kom.

3) Dit alles moet in die openbaar geskied met wisselwerkende deelname deur die publiek - en terme soos "agter geslote deure", "geheim" en "geklassifiseer" is tipies die wetenskaplike en joernalis se grootste vyande - terwyl sy/haar grootste vriende in die 21ste eeu ál meer die sosiale media is, veral Wikileaks.

In die geval van sulke hebbelikhede moet joernaliste/wetenskaplikes luid van hulle laat hoor - al is dit dae, maande, jare, dekades, eeue en selfs millennia ná die tyd.

- Leon van de Berg

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Van: dinker@yahoogroups.com [mailto:dinker@yahoogroups.com] Namens Petrus
Verzonden: woensdag 19 september 2012 9:17
Aan: dinker@yahoogroups.com
Onderwerp: RE: [dinker] MOET ONS NIE WEER IN STEEK LAAT!

 

Hiep-hiep-hoera! x 3

5 Reasons Why Conspiracy Theorists Are More Popular Than You Think

 Telling the truth is popular.

1. Public opinion polls show that the majority of Americans and Westerners agree with the views of "conspiracy theorists" more than those of government officials and media personalities. 

Public opinion polls show that public trust in government and the media is at an all time low. Their record of lying to the Western public is difficult to conceal, even with the biggest propaganda machine in history at their disposal. The growth and influence of the global alternative media has broken the magic spell over the public. The "mainstream media" is no longer mainstream. The old fringe is the new mainstream.

Conspiracy theorists have been proven right about so many issues and historical events, with 9/11 being the most important among them. The views of conspiracy theorists are more popular than ever because they are telling the truth.

Jesse Ventura, former Governor of Minnesota, tested this truth with a live CNN audience on Piers Morgan's show on Monday, September 17, 2012. At the 11:45 mark in this video, Piers Morgan tells Jesse Ventura, "I think you make some very sensible points and you make some crackpot points." Ventura responds, "That's your opinion," and then asks the live audience, "How many people here think I make crackpot points?" One person puts up his hand. He follows up, asking, "How many think I make sensible points?" The audience cheers and claps. Ventura turns to Morgan and says, "You're in the minority, my good friend."

2. The label "conspiracy theorist" has been used to death, and it is no longer effective in sidelining anti-government narratives to the fringe of public thought and public discourse.

Honest Western intellectuals have caught on to the fact that the label"conspiracy theorist" is a ridiculously overused in Western public discourse and serves no other purpose than to marginalize dissent. The label is used by abusive government officials and media personalities to subvert the democratic will of the American people and attack the credibility of dissidents.

It is a sign of social progress and intellectual development that more people are aware of the true intentions behind the habitual use of this totalitarian label by the government and media.

3. The global alternative media is raising the political consciousness of America and the West, and liberating millions from a propaganda prison whose bars are made of language and official narratives.

The reasons why people reject conspiracy theories are more well known today because of the Internet and global alternative media. This profound change has had the effect of creating a highly self-aware and super-conscious public that cannot be easily fooled into believing government false flags and deceptions as it was before.

Millions of thoughtful individuals are learning to treat anti-government narratives rationally and maturely, whereas in the past they used to stick the label "conspiracy theory" on them and didn't take them seriously. In the new language of mental resistance to government oppression, the term "conspiracy theory" is not applicable to alternative readings of history and alternative interpretations of current events.

4. The contradictions within mainstream narratives are harder to gloss over than before. 

It is impossible to keep track of all the official deceptions. Recent revelations in Libya and Syria have put mainstream narratives of the conflicts taking place there into question. After unofficially arming and financing Al-Qaeda affiliated groups in both countries, certain Western policy makers and their counterparts in Israel and the Arab monarchies are dishonestly making the argument that the growth of radical Islam demands greater Western intervention.

But their manipulative policy is the reason why the influence of radical Islamists is growing in the Arab world, so their case for more war is built on sand and illusion.

In this new information environment, conspiracy theorists are able to make the case that their interpretations of epoch-making historical events are factually correct by providing evidence and historical analysis to back up their controversial statements.

5. The growth of the public intelligence community over the last several years is counter-balancing the power of anti-freedom forces in secret intelligence communities and their spies in the corporate media. 

From now on, conspiracy theorists should be described as public intelligence analysts. We are part of a public intelligence community whose headquarters is the entire world. The public intelligence community has bases in North America, Europe, Latin America, Africa, China, Russia, and the Middle East. Our loyalty is to truth, freedom, and peace. We investigate reality to serve humanity, and bring nations together under the banner of peace and co-existence.

Public intelligence analysts such as Webster Tarpley, Thierry Meyssan,Alex Jones, Tony Cartalucci, David Icke, Gerald Celente, Paul Craig Roberts, and many others are destroying deceptive mainstream narratives that have been created to justify needless conflict between countries and civilizations.

The global 9/11 truth and justice movement is the fruit of the public intelligence community. And it will grow exponentially as more people wake up and look into the 9/11 events with a more critical eye.

Conclusion: The propaganda paradigm is collapsing. The truth about 9/11 is surfacing to global collective consciousness. Be optimistic about the future. The answers are staring us in the face. The solutions are in front of us. All we have to do is look.

Video of Jesse Ventura Live on CNN, Making Excellent Points About Politics And War

At the 11:45 mark in the video below, Piers Morgan tells Jesse Ventura, "I think you make some very sensible points and you make some crackpot points." Ventura responds, "That's your opinion," and then asks the live audience, "How many people here think I make crackpot points?" One person puts up his hand. He follows up, asking, "How many think I make sensible points?" The audience cheers and claps. Ventura turns to Morgan and says, "You're in the minority, my good friend."

That is great.

SAMAN MOHAMMADI

Email: truthexcavator@gmail.com Location: On Night Watch In The Mountains of The Internet Wilderness
Purpose: Excavate Truths, Educate Minds, And Above All Energize Spirits Frequently Asked Question: Can I Reprint Your Articles? Answer: Yes You Can. And Thank You.

GEWONE AFRIKANER/SWARTE WAS NOG NOOIT VAN BELANG

Mary

17 Sep, 2012 - 7:03 am

What has happened to Aung San Suu Kyi? After all she witnessed Sabra and Shatila and founded MAP because of what she saw there. Does everyone sell out in the end?

From Medialens

Aung San Suu Kyi, Pro-democracy campaigner traveling to the USA to receive Congressional Gold Medal

Posted by Ed on September 17, 2012, 5:05 am

“Aung San Suu Kyi, Burmese opposition leader, embarks on historic US trip
Pro-democracy campaigner will be awarded Congressional Gold Medal during 18-day trip that includes Washington and New York”

Pro-democracy campaigner to receive the US Congressional Gold Medal…square those two propositions if you can!

Maybe she can a get a picture with war criminal/pro-democracy campaigner Tony Blair showing his Congressional Gold Medal off too.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/sep/16/aung-san-suu-kyi-us-trip

Posted by Plus Ultra on September 17, 2012, 5:57 am, in reply to “Aung San Suu Kyi, Pro-democracy campaigner traveling to the USA to receive Congressional Gold Medal”

If she has any sense, and if she truly cares about the cause of human rights, she will tell them where they can shove their Congressional Gold medal. Let’s hope she doesn’t end up doing a Mandela.

~~~
The word Mandela is linked to this piece by John Pilger
http://johnpilger.com/articles/south-africa-the-liberations-betrayal:

South Africa: the liberation's betrayal

2 October 2008

The political rupture in South Africa is being presented in the outside world as the personal tragedy and humiliation of one man, Thabo Mbeki. It is reminiscent of the beatification of Nelson Mandela at the death of apartheid. This is not to diminish the power of personalities, but their importance is often as a distraction from the historical forces they serve and manage. Frantz Fanon had this in mind when, in The Wretched of the Earth, he described the "historic mission" of much of Africa's post-colonial ruling class as "that of intermediary [whose] mission has nothing to do with transforming the nation: it consists, prosaically, of being the transmission line between the nation and a capitalism, rampant though camouflaged."

Mbeki's fall and the collapse of Wall Street are concurrent and related events, as they were predictable. Glimpse back to 1985 when the Johannesburg stock market crashed and the apartheid regime defaulted on its mounting debt, and the chieftains of South African capital took fright. In September that year a group led by Gavin Relly, chairman of the Anglo American Corporation, met Oliver Tambo, the ANC president, and other resistance officials in Zambia. Their urgent message was that a "transition" from apartheid to a black-governed liberal democracy was possible only if "order" and "stability" were guaranteed. These were euphemisms for a "free market" state where social justice would not be a priority.

Secret meetings between the ANC and prominent members of the Afrikaner elite followed at a stately home, Mells Park House, in England. The prime movers were those who had underpinned and profited from apartheid - such as the British mining giant, Consolidated Goldfields, which picked up the bill for the vintage wines and malt whisky scoffed around the fireplace at Mells Park House. Their aim was that of the Pretoria regime - to split the ANC between the mostly exiled "moderates" they could "do business with" (Tambo, Mbeki and Mandela) and the majority who made up the those resisting in the townships known as the UDF.

The matter was urgent. When FW De Klerk came to power in 1989, capital was haemorrhaging at such a rate that the country's foreign reserves would barely cover five weeks of imports. Declassified files I have seen in Washington leave little doubt that De Klerk was on notice to rescue capitalism in South Africa. He could not achieve this without a compliant ANC.

Nelson Mandela was critical to this. Having backed the ANC's pledge to take over the mines and other monopoly industries - "a change or modification of our views in this regard is inconceivable" - Mandela spoke with a different voice on his first triumphant travels abroad. "The ANC," he said in New York, "will reintroduce the market to South Africa". The deal, in effect, was that whites would retain economic control in exchange for black majority rule: the "crown of political power" for the "jewel of the South African economy", as Ali Mazrui put it. When, in 1997, I told Mbeki how a black businessmen had described himself as "the ham in a white sandwich", he laughed agreement, calling it the "historic compromise", which others called a betrayal. However, it was De Klerk who was more to the point. I put it to him that he and his fellow whites had got what they wanted and that for the majority, the poverty had not changed. "Isn't that the continuation of apartheid by other means?" I asked. Smiling through a cloud of cigarette smoke, he replied, "You must understand, we've achieved a broad consensus on many things now."

Thabo Mbeki's downfall is no more than the downfall of a failed economic system that enriched the few and dumped the poor. The ANC "neo liberals" seemed at times ashamed that South Africa was, in so many ways, a third world country. "We seek to establish," said Trevor Manuel, "an environment in which winners flourish." Boasting of a deficit so low it had fallen to the level of European economies, he and his fellow "moderates" turned away from the public economy the majority of South Africans desperately wanted and needed. They inhaled the hot air of corporate-speak. They listened to the World Bank and the IMF; and soon they were being invited to the top table at the Davos Economic Forum and to G-8 meetings, where their "macro-economic achievements" were lauded as a model. In 2001, George Soros put it rather more bluntly. "South Africa," he said, "is now in the hands of international capital."

Public services fell in behind privatisation, and low inflation presided over low wages and high unemployment, known as "labour flexibility". According to the ANC, the wealth generated by a new black business class would "trickle down". The opposite happened. Known sardonically as the wabenzi because their vehicle of choice was a silver Mercedes Benz, black capitalists proved they could be every bit as ruthless as their former white masters in labour relations, cronyism and the pursuit of profit. Hundreds of thousands of jobs were lost in mergers and "restructuring" and ordinary people retreated to the "informal economy". Between 1995 and 2000, the majority of South Africans fell deeper into poverty. When the gap between wealthy whites and newly enriched blacks began to close, the gulf between the black "middle class" and the majority widened as never before.

In 1996, the office of the Reconstruction and Development Programme (RDP) was quietly closed down, marking the end of the ANC's "solemn pledge" and "unbreakable promise" to put the majority first. Two years later, the United Nations Development Programme described the replacement, GEAR, as basically "no different" from the economic strategy of the apartheid regime in the 1980s.

This seemed surreal. Was South Africa a country of Harvard-trained technocrats breaking open the bubbly at the latest credit rating from Duff & Phelps in New York? Or was it a country of deeply impoverished men, woman and children without clean water and sanitation, whose infinite resource was being repressed and wasted, yet again? The questions were an embarrassment as the ANC government endorsed the apartheid regime's agreement to join the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), which effectively surrendered economic independence, repaid the $25 billion of apartheid-era inherited foreign debt. Incredibly, Manuel even allowed South Africa's biggest companies to flee their financial home and set up in London.

Certainly, Thabo Mbeki speeded his own political demise with his strange strictures on HIV/Aids, his famous aloofness and isolation and the corrupt arms deals that never seemed to go away. It was the premeditated ANC economic and social catastrophe that saw him off. For further proof, look to the United States today and the smoking ruin of the "neo liberalism" model so cherished by the ANC's leaders. And beware those successors of Mbeki now claiming that, unlike him, they have the people's interests at heart as they continue the same divisive policies. South Africa deserves better.

KORT-EN-KRAGTIG

KÁN DIT DUIDELIKER?

A mass killer (with another at his side) speaks: 'There is absolutely no justification for this type of senseless violence'

Thursday, 13 September 2012 13:01

A mass killer sings from his song sheet while another looks on.

The hypocrisy and arrogance is breathtaking. This man has issued orders that have killed many thousands of innocent people and ordered the devastating bombing that has turned Libya into a scene of civil war, death, destruction and mob rule.

People like Obama and Clinton are actually clinically insane in that they do not have the capacity for shame, compassion and empathy, and condemn others for doing a fraction of the evil that they have done and continue to do.

Any violence and killing is outrageous, but for professional killers to promote themselves as the epitome of peace and decency would be laughable if it were not so tragic for so many.[ID]

THE ROVING EYE Mr Blowback rising in Benghazi By Pepe Escobar "Daddy, what is blowback?" Here's a fable to tell our children, by the fire, in a not so-distant post-apocalyptic, dystopian future. Once upon a time, during George "Dubya" Bush's "war on terra", the Forces of Good in Afghanistan captured - and duly tortured - one evil terrorist, Abu Yahya al-Libi.  Abu Yahya al-Libi was, of course, Libyan. He slaved three years in the bowels of Bagram prison near Kabul, but somehow managed to escape that supposedly impregnable fortress in July 2005.  At the time, the Forces of Good were merrily in bed with Colonel Muammar Gaddafi in Libya - whose intelligence services, to the delight of the Bush administration, were doing their nastiest to exterminate or at least isolate al-Qaeda-style Salafi-jihadis of the al-Libi kind.  But, then, in 2011, the Forces of Good, under new administration, decided it was time to bury the oh so passe "war on terra" and dance to a new, more popular groove; humanitarian intervention, also characterized as "kinetic military action".  So al-Libi was back from the dead - now fighting side by side with the Forces of Good to topple (and eventually snuff out) "evil" Col Gaddafi. Al-Libi had become a "freedom fighter" - even though he was openly calling for Libya to become an Islamic Emirate. The honeymoon didn't last long. In September 2012, for the first time in three months, al-Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri, aka The Surgeon, released a 42-minute video special to "celebrate" the 11th anniversary of 9/11, finally admitting the snuffing out of his number two. His number two was none other than Abu Yahya al-Libi - targeted by one of US President Barack Obama's cherished drones in Waziristan on June 4. An immediate effect of al-Zawahiri's video was that an angry armed mob, led by Islamist outfit Ansar al Sharia, set fire to the US consulate in Benghazi. The US ambassador to Libya, Christopher Stevens, was killed. It didn't matter that Stevens happened to be a hero of the "NATO rebels" who had "liberated" Libya - notoriously sprinkled with Salafi-jihadis of the al-Libi kind.  Stevens was rewarded by Washington with the ambassadorial post only after "evil" Gaddafi was finally sodomized, lynched and killed by, what else, an angry mob.  So finally the blowback serpent was able to bite its own tail. Terra, terra, terra What happened in Benghazi may have been just an out-of-control protest against a crude, amateur, made-in-California movie produced and directed by an Israeli-American real estate developer and certified Islamophobe (an identity now being reported as a guise), financed with US$5 million from unidentified Jewish donors, depicting Islam "as a cancer" and Prophet Muhammad as a womanizer, a pedophile and most of all, a fraud. The movie was duly promoted by wacko Florida pastor and Koran-burning freak Terry Jones. Yet the killing of the US ambassador in Libya is just an hors d'oeuvre to what may happen in Syria - where scores of "freedom fighters" supported by the CIA, the Turks and the House of Saud are al-Qaeda-linked, either via the supposedly reformist Libya Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG) or acronym-infested subcontracting gangs such as Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) or al-Qaeda in the Maghreb (AQIM). So how will Washington "bring the perpetrators to justice" in Libya? After all this is the same gang that was hailed as "heroes" when they sodomized, lynched and snuffed out "evil" Gaddafi.  Asia Times Online has been warning for over a year about blowback in Libya - and potentially in Syria, where medieval Saudi sheikhs frantically issue fatwas legitimating a widespread massacre of "infidel" Alawites. This is all a rerun of the same old 1980s' Afghan jihad movie; first you call them "freedom fighters", but when they attack us they revert to being "terrorists".  Now we have NATO-armed Salafi-jihadis in Libya, and House of Saud-financed and Turkey-based Salafi-jihadis in Syria - deploying "terra" antics such as suicide bombers to bring down the Assad regime - all wired up and ready to roll. It certainly adds a new meaning to Obama's "kinetic action" gig. Blowback - as in Afghanistan - might have taken years. This time Mr Blowback reared its ugly head in only a few months. And that's just the beginning.  So what now? Who're you gonna bomb? Who're you gonna drone to death? What about bombing Benghazi a year after condemning Gaddafi to death because he might have threatened to ... bomb Benghazi?  Ask US Secretary of State Hillary "We came, he saw, he died" Clinton, who claims to talk on behalf of the "Libyan people". Maybe she will come up with a policy of retroactively aligning the US with Gaddafi.  And since this is an electoral year, why not ask invisible former president Bush himself? After all, he proclaimed on September 20, 2001 that "either you are with us, or you are with the terra-rists." Well, Mr Blowback would say, beware of what you get when you are in bed with the terra-rists. Pepe Escobar is the author of Globalistan: How the Globalized World is Dissolving into Liquid War (Nimble Books, 2007) and Red Zone Blues: a snapshot of Baghdad during the surge. His most recent book is Obama does Globalistan (Nimble Books, 2009). He may be reached at pepeasia@yahoo.com (Copyright 2012 Asia Times Online (Holdings) Ltd. All rights reserved. Please contact us about sales, syndication and republishing.)

JOODS-CHRISTELIK-ISLAMITIESE DRIE-EENHEID

Jim Larkin

12 Sep, 2012 - 6:45 pm

Benghazi killings: Tariq Ali was right to describe incodents like this not as a “clash of civilisations” but as a “clash of fundamentalisms.

Tony Roma

12 Sep, 2012 - 6:45 pm

libya was sweet oil,gas,gold and water grab.
destroy a modern state bankrupt it open a central bank loan them money that has already been stolen.
what has happened to the 10s of billions from the libyan sovereign wealth fund.
well we know goldman sachs laughed as they lost a couple of billion in bad investments.

very interesting that this guy only had 3 armed protection in such an important place.
i suppose most cia and special forces are chillin near the oil pumps.

this is organized cia,mi6 and mossad chaos while they keep pumpin that sweet crude.
mr rockefeller will be soon opening a cancer care hospital as the amount of us,brit,french depleted uranium missile fired is in the tons.
cancer libyan style for a half a million years.
they sodomized gaddaffi before they killed him and he was a western asset in the last 10 years.they do that to friends real nice crowd the leaders of the free world are.

Jim Larkin

12 Sep, 2012 - 6:59 pm

Sorry about typos in last comment. My keyboard and I don’t get on very well. Just to add to what I said, incidents like this in which Westerners are killed by Muslims as a result of some idiotic provocation (on the anniversary of 9/11 of all days) generate intense anger in the West. Now we know what the victims of Obama’s drones feel like every week when they are casually slaughtered, unseen, untelevised, uncounted, out of sight, out of mind with not a word of protest from the Western corporate media.

Martin Luther King: “I have a dream”.

Obama: “I have a drone”.

DIS WEER SULKE TYD

» The 11th Anniversary of 9/11 ~ Paul Craig Roberts By: Paul Craig Roberts| September 11, 2012 | Categories: Articles & Columns | Tags: 9/11, The article below was written for the Journal of 9/11 Studies for the eleventh anniversary of September 11, 2001, the day that terminated accountable government and American liberty. It is posted here with the agreement of the editors. In order to understand the improbability of the government’s explanation of 9/11, it is not necessary to know anything about what force or forces brought down the three World Trade Center buildings, what hit the Pentagon or caused the explosion, the flying skills or lack thereof of the alleged hijackers, whether the airliner crashed in Pennsylvania or was shot down, whether cell phone calls made at the altitudes could be received, or any other debated aspect of the controversy. You only have to know two things. One is that according to the official story, a handful of Arabs, mainly Saudi Arabians, operating independently of any government and competent intelligence service, men without James Bond and V for Vendetta capabilities, outwitted not only the CIA, FBI, and National Security Agency, but all 16 US intelligence agencies, along with all security agencies of America’s NATO allies and Israel’s Mossad. Not only did the entire intelligence forces of the Western world fail, but on the morning of the attack the entire apparatus of the National Security State simultaneously failed. Airport security failed four times in one hour. NORAD failed. Air Traffic Control failed. The US Air Force failed. The National Security Council failed. Dick Cheney failed. Absolutely nothing worked. The world’s only superpower was helpless at the humiliating mercy of a few undistinguished Arabs. It is hard to image a more far-fetched story--except for the second thing you need to know: The humiliating failure of US National Security did not result in immediate demands from the President of the United States, from Congress, from the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and from the media for an investigation of how such improbable total failure could have occurred. No one was held accountable for the greatest failure of national security in world history. Instead, the White House dragged its feet for a year resisting any investigation until the persistent demands from 9/11 families for accountability forced President George W. Bush to appoint a political commission, devoid of any experts, to hold a pretend investigation. On 9/11 Doubts Were Immediate On September 11, 2001, a neighbor telephoned and said, “turn on the TV.” I assumed that a hurricane, possibly a bad one from the sound of the neighbor’s voice, was headed our way, and turned on the TV to determine whether we needed to shutter the house and leave. What I saw was black smoke from upper floors of one of the World Trade Center towers. It didn’t seem to be much of a fire, and the reports were that the fire was under control. While I was trying to figure out why every TV network had its main news anchor covering an office fire, TV cameras showed an airplane hitting the other tower. It was then that I learned that both towers had been hit by airliners. Cameras showed people standing at the hole in the side of the tower looking out. This didn’t surprise me. The airliner was minute compared to the massive building. But what was going on? Two accidents, one on top of the other?  The towers—the three-fourths or four-fifths of the buildings beneath the plane strikes--were standing, apparently largely undamaged. There were no signs of fire except in the vicinity of where the airliners had hit. Suddenly, one of the towers blew up, disintegrated, and disappeared in fine dust. Before one could make any sense of this, the same thing happened to the second tower, and it too disappeared into fine dust. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q6alf9_xswA  The TV news anchors compared the disintegration of the towers to controlled demolition. There were numerous reports of explosions throughout the towers from the base or sub-basements to the top. (Once the government put out the story of terrorist attack, references to controlled demolition and explosions disappeared from the print and TV media.) This made sense to me. Someone had blown up the buildings. It was completely obvious that the towers had not fallen down from asymmetrical structural damage. They had blown up. The images of the airliners hitting the towers and the towers blowing up were replayed time and again. Airliners hit the top portions of the towers, and not long afterward the towers blew up. I turned off the TV wondering how it was that cameras had been ready to catch such an unusual phenomenon as an airplane flying into a skyscraper.  I don’t remember the time line, but it wasn’t long before the story was in place that Osama bin Laden and his al Qaeda gang had attacked the US. A passport had been found in the rubble. Another airliner had flown into the Pentagon, and a fourth airliner had crashed or been shot down. Four airliners had been hijacked, meaning airport security had failed four times on the same morning. Terrorists had successfully assaulted America. When I heard these reports, I wondered. How could a tiny undamaged passport be found in the rubble of two skyscrapers, each more than 100 stories tall, when bodies, office furniture and computers could not be found? How could airport security fail so totally that four airliners could be hijacked within the same hour? How could authorities know so conclusively and almost immediately the names of the perpetrators who pulled off such a successful attack on the world’s only superpower, when the authorities had no idea that such an attack was planned or even possible? These questions disturbed me, because as a former member of the congressional staff and as a presidential appointee to high office, I had high level security clearances. In addition to my duties as Assistant Secretary of the US Treasury, I had FEMA responsibilities in the event of nuclear attack. There was a mountain hideaway to which I was supposed to report in the event of a nuclear attack and from which I was supposed to take over the US government in the event no higher official survived the attack. The more the story of 9/11 was presented in the media, the more wondrous it became. It is not credible that not only the CIA and FBI failed to detect the plot, but also all 16 US intelligence agencies, including the National Security Agency, which spies on everyone on the planet, and the Defense Intelligence Agency, Israel’s Mossad, and the intelligence agencies of Washington’s NATO allies. There are simply too many watchmen and too much infiltration of terrorist groups for such a complex attack to be prepared undetected and carried out undeterred.  Washington’s explanation of the attack implied a security failure too massive to be credible. Such a catastrophic failure of national security would mean that the US and Western Europe were never safe for one second during the Cold War, that the Soviet Union could have destroyed the entire West in one undetected fell swoop. As a person whose colleagues at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington were former secretaries of state, former national security advisors, former CIA directors, former chairmen of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, I was troubled by the story that a collection of individuals unsupported by a competent intelligence service had pulled off the events of 9/11. As a person with high level government service, I knew that any such successful operation as 9/11 would have resulted in immediate demands from the White House, Congress, and the media for accountability. There would have been an investigation of how every aspect of US security could totally fail simultaneously in one morning. Such a catastrophic and embarrassing failure of the national security state would not be left unexamined.  NORAD failed. The US Air Force could not get jet fighters in the air. Air Traffic Control lost sight of the hijacked airliners. Yet, instead of launching an investigation, the White House resisted for one year the demands of the 9/11 families for an investigation. Neither the public, the media, nor Congress seemed to think an investigation was necessary. The focus was on revenge, which the Bush neocon regime said meant invading Afghanistan which was alleged to be sheltering the perpetrator, Osama bin Laden. Normally, terrorists are proud of their success and announce their responsibility. It is a way to build a movement. Often a number of terrorist groups will compete in claiming credit for a successful operation. But Osama bin Laden in the last video that is certified by independent experts said that he had no responsibility for 9/11, that he had nothing against the American people, that his opposition was limited to the US government’s colonial policies and control over Muslim governments. It makes no sense that the “mastermind” of the most humiliating blow in world history ever to have been delivered against a superpower would not claim credit for his accomplishment. By September 11, 2001, Osama bin Laden knew that he was deathly ill. According to news reports he underwent kidney dialysis the following month. The most reliable reports that we have are that he died in December 2001. It is simply not credible that bin Laden denied responsibility because he feared Washington. But Osama bin Laden was too useful a bogeyman, and Washington and the presstitute media kept him alive for another decade until Obama needed to kill the dead man in order to boost his sinking standings in the polls so that Democrats would not back a challenger for the Democratic presidential nomination.  Numerous bin Laden videos, every one pronounced a fake by experts, were released whenever it was convenient for Washington. No one in the Western media or in the US Congress or European or UK parliaments was sufficiently intelligent to recognize that a bin Laden video always showed up on cue when Washington needed it. “Why would the ‘mastermind’ be so accommodating for Washington?” was the question that went through my mind every time one of the fake videos was released. The 9/11 “investigation” that finally took place was a political one run from the White House. One member of the commission resigned, declaring the investigation to be a farce, and both co-chairman and the legal counsel of the 9/11 Commission distanced themselves from their report with statements that the 9/11 Commission was “set up to fail,” that resources were withheld from the commission, that representatives of the US military lied to the commission and that the commission considered referring the false testimony for criminal prosecution.  One would think that these revelations would cause a sensation, but the news media, Congress, the White House, and the public were silent. All of this bothered me a great deal. The US had invaded two Muslim countries based on unsubstantiated allegations linking the two countries to 9/11, which itself remained uninvestigated. The neoconservatives who staffed the George W. Bush regime were advocating more invasions of more Muslim countries. Paul O’Neill, President Bush’s first Treasury Secretary, stated publicly that the Bush regime was planning to invade Iraq prior to 9/11. O’Neill said that no one at a National Security Council meeting even asked the question, why invade Iraq? “It was all about finding a way to do it.”  http://articles.cnn.com/2004-01-10/politics/oneill.bush_1_roomful-of-deaf-people-education-of-paul-o-neill-national-security-council-meeting?_s=PM:ALLPOLITICS  The leaked top secret Downing Street Memo written by the head of British intelligence (MI6) confirms Paul O’Neill’s testimony. The memo, known as the “smoking gun memo” whose authenticity has been confirmed, states that “President George W. Bush wants to remove Saddam Hussein, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy.” In other words, the US invasion of Iraq was based on nothing but a made up lie. As an engineering student I had witnessed a controlled demolition. When films of the collapse of WTC building 7 emerged, it was obvious that building 7 had been brought down by controlled demolition. When physics instructor David Chandler measured the descent of the building and established that it took place at free fall acceleration, the case was closed. Buildings cannot enter free fall unless controlled demolition has removed all resistance to the collapsing floors.  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lESol88wOi0  If airliners brought down two skyscrapers, why was controlled demolition used to bring down a third building? I assumed that structural architects, structural engineers, and physicists would blow the whistle on the obviously false story. If I could see that something was amiss, certainly more highly trained people would.  The first physicist to make an effective and compelling argument was Steven Jones at BYU. Jones said that explosives brought down the twin towers. He made a good case. For his efforts, he was pressured to resign his tenured position. I wondered whether the federal government had threatened BYU’s research grants or whether patriotic trustees and alumni were the driving force behind Jones’ expulsion. Regardless, the message was clear to other university based experts: “Shut up or we’ll get you.” Steven Jones was vindicated when chemist Niels Harrit of the University of Copenhagen In Denmark reported unequivocally that the scientific team in which he participated found nano-thermite in the residue of the twin towers. This sensational finding was not mentioned in the US print and TV media to my knowledge. Several years after 9/11 architect Richard Gage formed Architects and Engineers for 9/11 truth, an organization that has grown to include 1,700 experts. The plans of the towers have been studied. They were formidable structures. They were constructed to withstand airliner hits and fires. There is no credible explanation of their failure except intentional demolition. I also found disturbing the gullibility of the public, media, and Congress in the unquestioning acceptance of the official stories of the shoe-bomber, shampoo and bottled water bomber, and underwear bomber plots to blow up airliners in transit. These schemes are farcical. How can we believe that al Qaeda, capable of pulling off the most fantastic terrorist attack in history and capable of devising improvised explosive devices (IEDs) that kill and maim US troops and destroy US military vehicles would rely on something that had to be lighted with a match? The shoe and underwear bombers would simply have pushed a button on their cell phones or laptops, and the liquid bomb would not have required extended time in a lavatory to be mixed (all to no effect).  None of this makes any sense. Moreover, experts disputed many of the government’s claims, which were never backed by anything but the government’s story line. There is no independent evidence that anything was involved other than firecracker powders. The case of the underwear bomber is especially difficult to accept. According to witnesses, the underwear bomber was not allowed on the airliner, because he had no passport. So an official appears who walks him onto the airliner bound for Detroit on Christmas day. What kind of official has the authority to override established rules, and what did the official think would happen to the passenger when he presented himself to US Customs without a passport? Any official with the power to override standard operating practices would know that it was pointless to send a passenger to a country where his entry would be rejected. The circumstantial evidence is that these were orchestrated events designed to keep fear alive, to create new intrusive powers for a new over-arching federal policy agency, to accustom US citizens to intrusive searches and a police force to conducting them, and to sell expensive porno-scanners and now more advanced devices to the Transportation Safety Administration. Apparently, this expensive collection of high-tech gadgetry is insufficient to protect us from terrorists, and in August 2012 the Department of Homeland Security put in an order for 750 million rounds of ammunition, enough to shoot every person in the US 2.5 times. Naive and gullible Americans claim that if some part of the US government had been involved in 9/11, “someone would have talked by now.” A comforting thought, perhaps, but nothing more. Consider, for example, the cover-up by the US government of the 1967 Israeli attack on the USS Liberty that killed or wounded most of the crew but failed to sink the ship. As the survivors have testified, they were ordered in a threatening way not to speak about the event. It was twelve years later before one of the USS Liberty’s officers, James Ennes, told the story of the attack in his book, Assault on the Liberty. I continue to wonder how the professionals at the National Institute of Standards and Technology feel about being maneuvered by the federal government into the unscientific position NIST took concerning the destruction of the WTC towers.  What will be the outcome of the doubts about the official story raised by experts? I worry that most Americans are too mentally and emotionally weak to be able to come to grips with the truth. They are far more comfortable with the story that enemies attacked America successfully despite the massive national security state in place. The American public has proved itself to be so cowardly that it willingly, without a peep, sacrificed its civil liberty and the protections of law guaranteed by the Constitution in order to be “safe.” Congress is not about to expose itself for having squandered trillions of dollars on pointless wars based on an orchestrated “new Pearl Harbor.” When the neoconservatives said that a “new Pearl Harbor” was a requirement for their wars for American/Israeli hegemony, they set the stage for the 21st century wars that Washington has launched. If Syria falls, there is only Iran, and then Washington stands in direct confrontation with Russia and China.  Unless Russia and China can be overthrown with “color revolutions,” these two nuclear powers are unlikely to submit to Washington’s hegemony. The world as we know it might be drawing to a close. If enough Americans or even other peoples in the world had the intelligence to realize that massive steel structures do not disintegrate into fine dust because a flimsy airliner hits them and limited short-lived fires burn on a few floors, Washington would be faced with the suspicion it deserves.  If 9/11 was actually the result of the failure of the national security state to deter an attack, the government’s refusal to conduct a real investigation is an even greater failure. It has fallen to concerned and qualified individuals to perform the investigative role abandoned by government. The presentations at the Toronto Hearings, along with the evaluations of the Panel, are now available, as is the documentary film, “Explosive Evidence--Experts Speak Out,” provided by Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth.  The government’s agents and apologists try to deflect attention from disturbing facts by redefining factual evidence revealed by experts as the product of “a conspiracy culture.” If people despite their brainwashing and lack of scientific education are able to absorb the information made available to them, perhaps both the US Constitution and peace could be restored. Only informed people can restrain Washington and avert the crazed hegemonic US government from destroying the world in war.